by Jack Beatty
Against the testimony of contemporaries about the mortal danger Franz Ferdinand’s American solution posed to Magyar hegemony, the Dual Monarchy, and Serbian nationalism, one must set the doubts of historians whose recoil from Franz Ferdinand the man magnifies their contempt for his ideas. “Recent historiography is skeptical about the possibility of realizing any of” Franz Ferdinand’s plans, one Austrian scholar concludes. The archduke was “a federalist only when it gave promise of breaking Hungarian particularism.” Another says that his federalism “did not mean any … improvement of the position of the nationalities.” What the archduke sought was not the “equality of nations but their equal non-equality” under a “neo-absolutist” central government in Vienna.” “Franz Ferdinand,” A. J. P. Taylor asserts, “was one of the worst products of the Habsburg House: reactionary, clerical, brutal and overbearing, he was also often insane.” A Francis Joseph biographer agrees: “It is hard to escape the feeling that he would have become a disastrous Emperor if he had lived.”43
Perhaps, but that “what if” is of interest chiefly to Austria-Hungary scholars. We care about a different one: “If he had lived would World War I have happened?”* On that “counterfactual,” F. H. Hinsley, a British historian, voices the unspoken assumption shared by generations of historians: “If the Sarajevo crisis had not precipitated a particular great war, some other crisis would have precipitated a great war at no distant date.” War was inevitable. Some wars look that way in retrospect. If rebels had not fired on Fort Sumter in 1861, they would have attacked Fort Pickens or some other federal facility in the South, and that place would be as famous as Fort Sumter. The shelling of Fort Sumter was the catalyst of the American Civil War, not its cause. Franz Ferdinand’s assassination was an event of a different order. It satisfied so many of the conditions necessary for the war that the “what if” above cannot be dismissed with Hinsley’s bluff confidence in destiny.44
Consider the difference Franz Ferdinand’s absence made in Austria. Between December 1912 and July 1914 Austria-Hungary “went to the brink of war” four times over territorial aggrandizement by Serbia or Montenegro stemming from their victories over Turkey and Bulgaria in the Balkan Wars—but went over it only once. Franz Ferdinand was the most forceful advocate of peace on two of the three occasions, reinforcing the clement inclinations of Francis Joseph. On the third, spooked by the military’s “worst-case” analysis of December 1912 that Serbia might attack Austria-Hungary, he wavered briefly, before recovering the prudence that made him “as cautious in foreign affairs as he was impetuous in domestic policy.” On the fourth, he was dead, and Austria-Hungary declared war.45
The historian Samuel R. Williamson Jr. invites us to speculate on what might have happened if, instead of Franz Ferdinand, Princip had killed the governor general of Bosnia, Oskar Potiorek. It could easily have happened. Just as Princip pointed his automatic at the archduke, whose open touring car, having taken the wrong turn, had stopped to reverse five feet away, a policeman lunged at his hand—too late (by one account, an accomplice hit the policeman). Speed up the policeman’s arm by a millisecond, the Armageddon blink, and the bullet might have struck Potiorek, sitting in the front seat.* Franz Ferdinand, unscathed, would have been whisked away—and been in Vienna to shape Austria-Hungary’s response to Potiorek’s assassination.46
As he had in the three earlier war crises, as he did twenty-five times in 1913 alone, Chief of Staff Conrad von Hötzendorf, an army modernizer popular with junior officers, and “possibly, the single most important military figure in Europe’s rush to war,” would have demanded war with Serbia. Franz Ferdinand had pushed for Conrad’s appointment to chief of staff in 1906 partly on the strength of the general’s anti-Magyar convictions. Conrad’s war-mongering made him regret this, and in 1911 he had prodded Francis Joseph to relieve Conrad only, bowing to pressure from the army, to turn full circle and urge his recall a year later.47
Against Conrad’s call for war in July 1914, in our counterfactual scenario, Franz Ferdinand would have pressed argument like this one from a 1913 letter to Count Berchtold: “Suppose we wage a separate war against Serbia? In no time at all, we will overthrow it, but what then, and what good will it do us?… God save us from annexing Serbia; a country over its head in debts, brimming with regicides [!] and scoundrels, etc. As it is we cannot even cope with Bosnia … And Serbia will be far worse! We can throw away billions there and still be faced with terrible irredenta.” Cross-examination of Conrad would have educed that the army had no plans to occupy Serbia: “In the most favorable case, the Austro-Hungarian Army would march into Serbia; it would extract promises of good behavior from the Serbs; and then it would leave.” Austria-Hungary wanted, Franz Ferdinand once told Conrad, “not a single plum tree or a single sheep” from the Balkans. Why, to mount a punitive raid on Serbia, start a war with Russia?48
For, Franz Ferdinand would have reminded Conrad in front of Francis Joseph, Serbia was Russia. “If we take the field against Serbia, Russia will stand behind her, and we will have the war with Russia,” he had written to Berchtold. Could Austria hope to prevail when Russia fielded ninety-three divisions to Austria’s forty-eight and spent three quarters more on armaments than she did? “War with Russia will mean the end of us … Should the Austrian Emperor and the Russian tsar topple one another from the throne and clear the way for revolution?” Incredibly, during the Common Ministerial Council of July 7 that set Vienna’s strategy, nobody raised Franz Ferdinand’s questions about the foreseeable consequences of war with Russia, which all assumed Germany would deter.49
Finally, Franz Ferdinand would have played the nationalities’ card against Conrad, who advocated war as a domestic political imperative. “Two principles stood in sharp conflict,” Conrad wrote in his memoirs, “the preservation of Austria-Hungary as a conglomerate of different nationalities …; the rise of separate independent national states which would attract their co-nationals in Austro-Hungarian territory and bring about the disintegration of the Monarchy … That and not expiation of the murder was the reason why Austria-Hungary was forced to unsheath the sword against Serbia.” War, he believed, would weld the national minorities to the empire. It was all that would. To stay together, Austria-Hungary had to risk breaking up under the hammer of war.50*
Based on his known views, Franz Ferdinand would have retorted that the risk was too great, the centripetal forces generated by war too strong. Incited by Russia, the minorities would revolt, trading their subordinate status in a German-Magyar-dominated “nation of nationalities” for independence as “nation states.” That danger was familiar to Conrad. In the event of a prolonged German-Slavic (Russian) war, he wrote to General Helmuth von Moltke, the German chief of staff, in 1913, “we can hardly count on the enthusiastic support of our Slavs, 47 percent of our population.” Could this advocate of war to save the monarchy have met the more plausible argument that war would destroy it? Conrad was coolly rational in his memoirs; in 1914 he was fatalistic. The night of Sarajevo, in a letter to his mistress, he expressed a desperate pessimism: “It will be a hopeless struggle but nevertheless it must be because such an ancient monarchy and such an ancient army cannot perish ingloriously.” Could this doomsayer have given a convincingly positive answer to Franz Ferdinand’s simple, devastating question, Can we win?51
Auspiciously, Franz Ferdinand and Stephen Tisza, the Hungarian prime minister, would have been on the same side in July 1914—against war. This would have “carried considerable weight because the two men were otherwise always at odds,” the political scientist Richard Ned Lebow writes. “With Franz Ferdinand urging moderation, Berchtold, a weak personality, would also have pursued a cautious line, and Francis Joseph, cross-pressured in 1914, would probably have sided with them instead of with Conrad.” The Franz Ferdinand biographer Robert A. Kann concurs: “Berchtold’s policy was largely dictated by the Heir Apparent.” With Franz Ferdinand gone, Berchtold, using the same words at roughly the same time as the Russian
foreign minister Alexander Serge Sazonov in St. Petersburg, declared, “Failure to act decisively” would be “the renunciation of our Great Power position.”52
At the council meetings what Vienna journalists called “the war party” was led by Conrad and General Oskar Potiorek, lamentably alive. Potiorek wanted to bury in the rubble of war his responsibility for the lax security in a city hung with Serbian flags (commemorating the battle of Kosovo in 1389) until authorities removed them just before the archduke’s arrival. Conrad wanted war to impress his girlfriend.
Frustrated from sharing the favors of Gina von Reininghaus with her husband, Hermann, the beer king of Austria-Hungary, Conrad imagined that if he led the army to victory a bedazzled Gina, twenty-eight years his junior and the mother of six, would sue for divorce while a grateful emperor would persuade the Vatican to permit them to marry in the church. In the first months of the war when he was trying hard to wow Gina and before she converted to Protestantism, Conrad’s judgment was rushed and rash. An example came as early as August 3 when he cited a report from the military attaché in London to argue “that there is no desire [in England] for war for the time being, taking into account the Ulster crisis and the civil war.” The next day, England declared war on Germany and, eight days later, on Austria-Hungary.53
Franz Ferdinand, a strict Roman Catholic, censured Conrad’s romance with Gina, at one point ambiguously warning Berchtold that Conrad’s personal stake in war endangered the monarchy. In our counterfactual argument in Vienna over whether to attack Serbia for Potiorek’s assassination in Sarajevo, the archduke might well have impeached Conrad’s war mania by surfacing its, in the circumstances, grotesquely selfish motives.54
Historical analysis arrives at the same destination as counterfactual speculation. Comparing the Habsburg elite’s attitude toward war with Serbia before and after the assassination, Holger Afflerbach and David Stevenson conclude that “Sarajevo really was the decisive moment: without the murder of Franz Ferdinand and his wife, there would have been no decision for war in Vienna, and therefore no general conflict.”55
The latter point shifts the focus to Berlin. In a brilliant paper, “Franz Ferdinand Found Alive: World War I Unnecessary,” Lebow argues that the assassination “created the necessary psychological environment for kaiser and chancellor to overcome their inhibitions about war.” The murder of “Franzi,” his friend and fellow-crowned head, whom he had seen in Bohemia two weeks earlier, shocked Wilhelm. He had not taken seriously Vienna’s obsession with the Serbs; he did now. In Bethmann Hollweg Sarajevo crystallized a “gestalt shift” from brooding on Russian power to being willing to risk war with Russia. The politics of the assassination were fortuitous for the chancellor. Princip’s Serbian connection kindled Socialist Russophobia into a unanimous SPD vote in the Reichstag for war credits, satisfying the domestic precondition for war. Altogether, Sarajevo belonged to a special category of incidents that are at once catalysts and causes of war. President Lyndon Johnson’s national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, termed them “streetcars,” referring to the February 1965 Vietcong attack on the American adviser’s barracks in Pleiku. Washington could count on such streetcars to provide the pretext to escalate the Vietnam War. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand was Berlin’s streetcar to preventive war against Russia.56
If he had lived, would another streetcar have come along? The hour was late; the line shutting down. The day Franz Ferdinand became emperor his military staff planned to move against Hungary. That would have been in 1916, after Francis Joseph’s death. From that date Austria-Hungary would be embroiled in civil strife. It could not start a war with Serbia; Berlin would wait in vain for that streetcar. By 1917, Russia’s railways to the German border would be completed; so would the Great Program military buildup begun in June 1914 in reaction to the Liman von Sanders affair. This would expand Russia’s peacetime army to two million men. Germany’s strategy for a two-front war, to defeat France before Russia could mobilize, would be obsolete when Russia could mobilize rapidly. German officials saw this coming. “The future belongs to Russia which is growing and growing and is becoming an ever increasing nightmare to us. After the completion of her strategic railroads in Poland our position will be untenable,” Bethmann Hollweg confided to his aide Kurt Riezler at the beginning of the July Crisis. Germany had a three-year window in which it could risk a war with Russia and France. After that, the German generals, Lebow writes, “would … no longer have an incentive to launch a preventive war or preempt in a crisis, and to the extent that they were fearful of Russian military capabilities, they might even have become a force for preserving the peace.”57
Counterfactual history reminds us that great events can be both massively overdetermined—see Lebow’s table on the Underlying Causes of War, each one representing a mountain of scholarship—and contingent, as Herodotus has it, on things that don’t happen or happen at the wrong time. All the big causes swirled around Franz Ferdinand in June 1914, but none decided him to go to Sarajevo.*
The happy couple arrives in Sarajevo.
Francis Joseph was stricken with severe bronchitis in April. He had inflammation of the lung, and his life hung in the balance. For the last ten days of the month, Franz Ferdinand kept an engine under steam at a station near his Bohemian castle to take him to Vienna at a moment’s notice should his uncle’s condition worsen. But the old man rallied. The talk in Vienna, the Times reported, was that his recovery was spurred “by his keen desire to spite his nephew and delay his accession to the imperial throne for as long as possible.”
On June 4, Franz Ferdinand met with him in Vienna and, pleading the extreme heat, asked to be excused from attending, in his capacity as inspector general of the army, long-scheduled maneuvers in Bosnia later that month. Francis Joseph replied that it was of course his choice—“but added that, if he went, Sophie might accompany him officially to Sarajevo on June 28—the anniversary of their pact of marriage.” Officially: Meaning Sophie could be treated, for that trip, as his equal. Franz Ferdinand loved his wife. He changed his mind.58
6
FRANCE
THE WAGES OF IMPERIALISM
Agadir was the most arduous adventure that France had known.
—Joseph Caillaux, Agadir, 1925
I agree, too, that Caillaux is the man to bring it off, and, if this war materializes, I rather think the historians—who’ve made so much of Cleopatra’s nose—will ascribe its due importance to the tragic revolver shot at the Figaro offices when they’re unraveling the causes of the war … One thing for sure, my boy: if he had stayed in power, things wouldn’t have come to the pass they’ve got to now.
—A character in Summer 1914, a novel by Roger Martin du Gard
Millions of bullets were fired in 1914 but only two changed history: The bullet fired by Princip’s Browning automatic that pierced Franz Ferdinand’s uniform collar and entered his neck, and the bullet fired by Henriette Caillaux that killed Gaston Calmette, the editor of Le Figaro, whom she believed was about to expose the intimate secrets of her marriage. Except for the bark of her Browning, Henriette’s husband Joseph Caillaux would have been France’s premier in July 1914. His elevation from finance minister would have incalculably affected German opinion. “If Monsieur Caillaux had remained in office, if Madame Caillaux’s gesture had not been made,” the Kölnische Zeitung observed months into the war, “the plot against the peace of Europe would not have succeeded,” Caillaux would have eased the pressure of that paranoia. Vienna and Berlin made the plot against the peace, but in the story the German public was told it was hatched in St. Petersburg and Paris, by Nicholas II and French president Raymond Poincaré, a Lorrainer who schemed to recover by a new war the two provinces, Alsace-Lorraine, lost to Germany in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71. Caillaux, born in Le Mans, was not from one of the Lost Provinces. As premier in 1911, he had defused a crisis with Germany by back-channel negotiations through the German embassy in Paris. He was a known critic of France
’s ties to England and of the machinations of Russia’s ambassador to France, Alexander Izvolski, who to revenge himself on Austria-Hungary for his humiliation in the Bosnia crisis of 1908 worked for war with the Central Powers. The man who would have been Caillaux’s Foreign Minister in July 1914, the Socialist giant Jean Jaurès, was a passionate critic of France’s military alliance with Russia and the most famous anti-militarist, if not pacifist, in Europe. At a minimum, with Caillaux as premier and Jaurès as foreign minister Berlin would have had a significantly harder time selling the war to Germany’s socialist workers, who knew Jaurès as a voice for fraternity between the German and French working classes. The Social Democrats were the largest party in the Reichstag, and without their support Bethmann Hollweg would have hesitated to risk war.
In the weeks after Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, would imponderables like these have moved Berlin to restrain Vienna? The case for the desirability of war undoubtedly would have encountered friction among the coterie of German decision makers. Somehow, in some way, things would have been different—perhaps different enough to slow or stop the war.
In Summer 1914, the last volume in Roger Martin du Gard’s chronicle of the Thibault family, two friends are discussing the slide to war during the last days of peace. One of them challenges us to think anew about the inevitability of World War I: “If this war materializes, I rather think the historians—who’ve made so much of Cleopatra’s nose—will ascribe its due importance top the tragic pistol shot at the Figaro offices when they’re unraveling the causes of the war. One thing’s for sure, my boy, if Caillaux had stayed in power things would not have come to the pass they’ve got to now.”
According to the American ambassador to Germany, James W. Gerard, as late as July 1914 the German Foreign Office believed the British were “so occupied with the Ulster rebellion and unrest in Ireland that they would not declare war.” There was no French Ulster; the Germans knew the French would fight but doubted their staying power. Field Marshal von Moltke was confident that “once France is defeated in the first big battles, then this country, which does not have great reserves of people, will hardly be able to continue a long war.”1
